A blog by Devendra Tewari
Atmel has at two IDEs that I know of
A cross-platform, Eclipse based, AVR32 Studio.
A Windows only, Visual Studio Isolated Shell based, Atmel Studio 6.
I am studying migrating from AVR32 Studio to Atmel Studio 6. Luckily, migration is made painless in Atmel Studio 6 due to the import option under the File menu. You can specify the location of your AVR32 Studio workspace, tell the import wizard to find/list projects under the workspace, and select all projects you want to migrate. The wizard does in-place migration, so backup your work before running the wizard. It shouldn’t mess anything up but you never know. The tool creates a solution file in the workspace folder, and a project file with the extension cproj under each project.
I had to eliminate the compiler option -march=ucr1 to proceed with the build - GCC compiler with the newer toolchain refuses to compile with message Conflicting architectures implied by -mpart and -march.
I did find one minor issue after migration. My project uses a linker script to place code and data in flash and SRAM. The linker flag -T used to specify the linker script was not migrated over. The same thing happened with the flag -Wl,-e that is used specify the entry point. I had to add these manually to project settings in the Linker flags text box under Toolchain, AVR32/GNU Linker, Miscellaneous.
One last thing I had to do was exclude the linker script from compilation, otherwise the build fails.
The biggest problem I faced was post build. The target board would reset on executing the code. GCC version that ships with Atmel Studio 6 is 4.4.3 (AVR_32_bit_GNU_Toolchain_3.4.0_332). Whereas, the GCC version that ships with AVR32 Studio 2.6 is 4.3.3 (AVR_Toolchain_3.0_124). Similarly, GNU ld is also newer. I confirmed toolchain was the culprit, by creating a Flavour Configuration (accessible from under menu Tools, Options…) that points to the toolchain provided with AVR32 Studio, and changing the project settings to that flavor from the Advanced tab. I still haven’t figure out what is wrong with the new toolchain.
I have been able to successfully install it on Windows 8. The only hassle being the following message a short while after launch
Could not connect to the local debug agent. Make sure avrdbg.exe is started and not blocked by firewall or antivirus program.
You’ll find instructions to get the debugger working again here. Atmel Studio 6.1 update works out of the box.
Fairly straight forward, just fire it up. The only issue I found is that it fails to detect USB drivers for AVR debuggers.
It shows the following message
The USB drivers required for communicating with AVR debuggers such AVR ONE!, JTAGICE mkII and AVR Dragon do no appear to be installed.
The solution is to uninstall the updated driver and install the older one. This is not required after the Atmel Studio 6.1 update, both IDEs coexist well.